Planet Nine is “hiding” in the depths of the solar system – doubts about an “ice giant”

There may be a ninth planet in our solar system waiting to be discovered. Our solar system contains eight planets, but in recent years, astronomers have argued that there could be another planet hiding in our system that we haven’t been able to see yet.

This is because, because it is so far from the sun, it will be dimly lit, as if you were looking for a flea in a haystack, which means existing telescopes may not be able to spot it.

However, a new telescope that will begin scanning the sky in 2025 may be able to detect it if Japan’s Subaru Telescope in Hawaii cannot detect it.

The new telescope at the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile could find the “elusive” Planet Nine, nicknamed Planet Nine, in the coming years or rule it out entirely, experts told Live Science.

“It’s really hard to explain the solar system without Planet Nine, but there’s no way to be completely sure it exists until you see it,” said Mike Brown, an astronomer at the California Institute of Technology.

It is believed to be an ice giant, as it is said to be at a great distance from the sun.

With the exception of Pluto, which was demoted from planet to dwarf planet in 2006, no planets have been found beyond Neptune or the Kuiper Belt, a massive ring of asteroids, comets and dwarf planets that orbit the Sun but are incredibly far from it. .

In 2004, scientists discovered that Sedna, a potential dwarf planet beyond the Kuiper Belt, has an eccentric orbit around the Sun, meaning another large mass is pulling it gravitationally.

The Planet Nine hypothesis was published by Brown and Konstantin Batyztin in 2016. “At first, we didn’t say there was a planet because we thought it was ridiculous that there was a planet,” Brown told Live Science. “But we tried a lot of different things to explain what we saw, and nothing else worked.”

Finally, other astronomers have stated that it is “very likely” that there is a Planet Nine, but others are not convinced.

*With information from indy100

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